Medium raw A bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook

Anthony Bourdain surveys the food world 10 years after 'Kitchen Confidential.' ANTHONY BOURDAIN was exceptionally well positioned to bang out "Kitchen Confidential" in 2000: he'd spent 28 years behind restaurant stoves and had a couple of noirish novels to his name. The memoir exposed the darkest corners of New York's kitchens and dining rooms. Now, after 10 years as a food-world celebrity and BFF of top chefs, he's even better positioned to dish it out to the industry and its four-star hype machine. Unfortunately, as the title of his new essay collection, "Medium Raw," warns, he gives it to us half-cooked. In the years since he hung up his clogs, the foul-mouthed Bourdain has become famous as much for his adventures-in-eating show, "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations," as for his role as the patron saint of culinary students and nostar cooks who consider "Kitchen Confidential" a guide rather than a cautionary tale. Gadfly and advocate, fanboy and food luminary, he's carved out a role as an acerbically funny raconteur and takedown artist who generates clouds of Web traffic each time he eviscerates a bloated personality or calls out a restaurant for bogus tactics. "Medium Raw" follows his 2006 sausage-maker, "The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones." This "bloody valentine" contains pointed critiques, astute asides and semireported stories that tend to circle back to himself - the real reason, he presumes, you're buying this book. It's an often funny, sometimes confusing mix. And it's always personal, even when it gets political. There are riffs on what it would take to get him to sell out, how he ended up on St. Barts with a cokehead in a $1,000 T-shirt, and why you shouldn't become a professional cook; there's a profile of a contestant who got axed from "Top Chef," a story of how Bourdain and his wife tried to prevent their toddler from eating McDonald's and, to wrap it up, two chapters on what he's learned since "Kitchen Confidential." Bourdain has insight, access and good taste, and he's a naturally engaging writer. But as a Personality, he can't resist shoving his mug into the frame. A chapter on meat begins with his beliefs on the great American burger; angrily digests the findings of a New York Times article on the life-threatening practices at meat-processing plants; spins into the rise of the $26 designer burger; name-checks chefs who are making things like tripe, "artisanal" pizza and cereal milk popular; and ends with the befuddling line "Am I helping, once again, to kill the things I love?" Some essays are simply about the coolness that is his life. "Lust" begins with a Lou Reed quotation and slides into a Graham-Greene-meets-Tom-Waits reverie in Hanoi: "I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars - an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss." Then we're whisked away on the back of a scooter for a beautifully observed tour through the city's streets and pho shops. After debating the cruelty of writing such "food and travel porn," he gives in and lays out sensual snapshots of international feasts. Somehow, Sichuan peppercorns prompt him to conclude the breathless sampler with the lines: "Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad. Pleasure was good. Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused." Until now, that is. When everything started to read as if it were written after the third gin in Cathay Pacific business class. Bourdain is acutely aware of his own shtick, which risks turning him into Andy Rooney in a leather jacket. People expect, he acknowledges, "the angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on 'Top Chef' - and I guess it would be pretty easy to keep going with that: a long-running lounge act, the exasperatedly enraged food guy. 'Rachael Ray? What's up with that?!' (Cue snare drum here.) To a great extent that's already happened." (He sheepishly admits that he backed off Rachael Ray after she sent him a fruit basket.) In the edible schoolyard, Bourdain adopts the tactic of flogging his flaws lest someone get to them first. But now, as his essays make clear, he's hanging with chef gods like Fergus Henderson, being invited to shoot rare kitchen footage at El Bulli and rolling up to the French Laundry in a prom limo with Eric Ripert. His back is covered. And so he can fling lentils at Alice Waters, call writers and chefs unprintable names, and admit that he hated his meal at Alinea. Why is he still so angry? Because he cares. Beneath the relentless swearing, the back-of-the-classroom bullying and the Mudd Club hipster posturing, Bourdain is a hopeless romantic when it comes to food and the people who cook. The subtitle's real valentines are two elegantly written profiles - yes, of other people - that make you wish he'd worked this hard throughout. His attempt to understand the Momofuku chef David Chang is full of pathos and demonstrates Bourdain' s knowledge of the restaurant scene. And his portrait of Justo Thomas, Le Bernardina fish butcher, has him prostrate as Thomas cleans and fillets 700 pounds of fish in five hours. In a heartwarming turn, he invites Thomas to lunch in the restaurant for which he works - and where he's never eaten. Bourdain knows he's living a chef's dream. If only he remembered that he's living a writer's fantasy, too, and would pay attention to his craft again. After all, it's his prose, not his cooking, that got him a seat at the table. The acerbic Bourdain sheepishly admits that he backed off Rachael Ray after she sent him a fruit basket. Christine Muhlke is the food editor of The Times Magazine.

Bourdain, who broke into the collective food consciousness with Kitchen Confidential (2000) and has since cemented his place as one of our foremost food commentators, offers the kind of book you can write only if you've achieved the level of fame at which you can assume that people care about about whatever you have to say (which they do, and should): a loose, sometimes repetitive, always entertaining, and even at times enlightening collection of food-related ramblings and name-naming hit-pieces. The result is more or less the book equivalent of finding yourself sharing plates at a communal table with a chatty, witty, unapologetically profane, knowledgeable and well-connected member-observer of the restaurant big leagues. If, like him, you see the world's greatest chefs as somewhere between rock and porn stars, there's no way you wouldn't spend hours listening to him chew your ear off with stories of that coke-fueled weekend (or was it a month?) trapped on an island with the world's most insufferably wealthy food posers and with diatribes on how annoying Alice Waters is and how critic Alan Richman is a douchebag (the nicer of the two things Bourdain calls him) for trashing the New Orleans food scene with the city still reeling from Katrina and then turn on a dime to deliver an impassioned ode to Vietnamese pho and an admiring portrait of perhaps the world's finest fish-portioner at Le Bernardin. It might have been a narcissistic, condescending, and overly insiderish collection if it weren't for Bourdain's consistently disarming self-awareness that he's the very picture of the jaded, overprivileged foodie' (in the worst sense of that word) that he used to despise. On seeing himself through the eyes of a hungry young chef who still has to actually cook just to barely survive, he says, Look at me and my nice fucking jacket, standing there all famous and shit. Sure, others may cook better than he does, but no one can dish like he can.--Chipman, Ian Copyright 2010 Booklist